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On Tuesday, AI lab Moonvalley announced the public release of Marey, a video model designed as a production-grade tool for professional filmmakers.Mareypronounced Mary and named after early film pioneer Étienne-Jules Mareywas trained exclusively on explicitly licensed material. Cofounder and CEO Naeem Talukdar says this approach helps avoid the copyright risks associated with video generation tools trained on unauthorized footage. Marey has no idea what Star Wars is, he says. It has no idea what Toy Story is.Just as importantly, Marey offers a level of control uncommon in most video generation tools, which typically produce clips based solely on text prompts. Our thesis is that these models arent really set up for real, professional-grade creators, Talukdar says. Its very difficult for serious filmmakers to create things with that.[Image: Moonvalley]While users can begin with a prompt, they can also upload scenes shot with real actors and ask Marey to generate similar footagewith altered objects, backgrounds, or costumes. The AI preserves actor movements, including mouth motion, allowing speech to be seamlessly dubbed or interpreted more loosely.In a demo for Fast Company, Talukdar showcased an AI-generated clip of a running bison, where both the camera angles and the animals motion closely mimicked an existing car commercial-style reference provided to Marey.Filmmakers can further refine the generated video, dragging objects to animate them or specifying camera movement for virtual pans and zooms. In the coming months, Moonvalley plans to roll out additional features for controlling lighting and audio, and for defining characters and placing them on a virtual set, Talukdar says.The company is also beta testing a tool called Voyager, designed to help users manage character libraries and adjust lighting and scene details with increasing precisionfar beyond the capabilities of early prompt-only video tools.Our conviction is, youre not going to make a movie on a chatbot, Talukdar says. You need a lot more sophisticated tooling.[Image: Moonvalley]Rather than replacing filmmakers or generating entire films automatically, Moonvalleys goal is to create AI software that serves as a power tool for creators. According to Talukdar, Marey can help level the playing field between big-budget studio productions and independent filmmakers by enabling complex scene creation at a fraction of the cost.Although the system currently generates about 10 seconds of video at a time, the model and control tools maintain a strong enough grasp of continuity to allow filmmakers to extend those sequences or generate related shots for full scenes.The directors can realize the full extent of their creative vision, he says. The way that they want that scene to look is how theyre going to make that scene look rather than having to be deeply constrained, he says.Marey was developed in collaboration with studio Asteria, cofounded by Bryn Mooser and Natasha Lyonne, which is using the tool to develop its feature film Uncanny Valley.[Image: Moonvalley]Moonvalley raised $70 million in seed funding last year from backers including Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst, and is currently in the midst of a new fundraising round.Subscription plans are available at $14.99, $34.99, and $149.99 per month, each with varying credit limits to use the AI; additional credits can be purchased as needed. Talukdar says credit prices are expected to drop quickly as faster computing chips become available.To assemble licensed training data, Moonvalley partnered with independent filmmakers, commercial creators, YouTubers, and studios globally. Talukdar himself reached out to potential contributors, helping the company collect a diverse range of footage. In some cases, they even acquired physical media to extract unique training data.Any kind of filmmaker, for every minute of footage that they actually publish, they probably have 10 to 100 minutes of B-roll thats just kind of sitting there, Talukdar says.
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E-Commerce
How would you spend $342 billion? A number of games called “Spend Elon Musk’s Money” have been popping up online, inviting users to imagine how theyd blow through the wealth of the worlds richest man. If Elon cashed out all of his stocks & assets today he would have approximately $354,000,000,000 (US Dollars) in his bank account (Forbes 2025), reads one such website. What would you spend it on? Among the options: a Tesla Bot for $20,000, your own satellite stamped with your name for $80 million, eating out for every meal for 80 years for a modest $4.1 million, or the Mona Lisa, priced at an estimated $869 million. Even if you bought all of those, youd only have spent about 0.27% of Musks total wealth, according to the calculator. To put it in perspective, spending $1 million every single day would still take about 970 years to exhaust Musks fortune. On TikTok, users are trying it themselvesadding to their bill seven motorcycles, 20 Ferraris, 20 skyscrapers, 16 tanks, 32 Rolexes, 5 gold bars, 21 yachts, 25 Formula One cars, 15 Boeing 747s, and 20 helicopters, to name a few. Even after all that, they still had more than $24 billion left. @themakeshiftproject Seeing How Much Elon Musk Can Buy With All His Money! #fyp #elonmusk #money #rich #wealthy #billionaire original sound – The Makeshift Project No one needs this much money, one person commented. I just want to afford my bills another added. Another TikTok user visited the website youvsabillionaire.com and plugged in the average American salary of $66,000. You putting 25 cents in a parking meter is like Elon Musk buying a Rolls Royce, she explained. You buying a $350,000 home is 19 cents to Elon Musk. You finding $20 in your pocket would be the same as Elon finding $37 million in his pocket. How that fortune holds up with his proposed plans to form a new political party remains to be seen. Last week, Musk announced on X the formation of the “America Party, which he claimed would give Americans back their freedom. On Monday, Tesla stock fell sharply. One way to execute on this would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts. Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 4, 2025 President Donald Trump responded in a Truth Social post on Saturday that Musk has gone off the rails essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks. Musk spent nearly $300 million to help Trump and other Republicans get elected last year. Seems he couldve better spent that money on two private islands, three Lamborghini Aventadors, and a satellite with his name on it.
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E-Commerce
Amazon is extending its annual Prime Day sales and offering new membership perks to Gen Z shoppers amid tariff-related price worries and possibly some consumer boredom with an event marking its 11th year.The e-commerce giant’s promised blitz of summer deals for Prime members starts at 3:01 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday. For the first time, Seattle-based Amazon is holding the now-misnamed Prime Day over four days; the company launched the event in 2015 and expanded it to two days in 2019.Before wrapping up Prime Day 2025 early Friday, Amazon said it would have deals dropping as often as every five minutes during certain periods. Prime members ages 18 to 24, who pay $7.49 per month instead of the $14.99 that older customers not eligible for discounted rates pay for free shipping and other benefits, will receive 5% cash back on their purchases for a limited time.Amazon executives declined to comment on the potential impact of tariffs on Prime Day deals. The event is taking place two and a half months after an online news report sparked speculation that Amazon planned to display added tariff costs next to product prices on its website.White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denounced the purported change as a “hostile and political act” before Amazon clarified the idea had been floated for its low-cost Haul storefront but never approved.Amazon’s past success with using Prime Day to drive sales and attract new members spurred other major retail chains to schedule competing sales in July. Best Buy, Target, and Walmart are repeating the practice this year.Like Amazon, Walmart is adding two more days to its promotional period, which starts Tuesday and runs through July 13. The nation’s largest retailer is making its summer deals available in stores as well as online for the first time. Here’s what to expect: More days might not mean more spending Amazon expanded Prime Day this year because shoppers “wanted more time to shop and save,” Amazon Prime Vice President Jamil Ghani recently told The Associated Press.Analysts are unsure the extra days will translate into more purchases given that renewed inflation worries and potential price increases from tariffs may make consumers less willing to spend. Amazon doesn’t disclose Prime Day sales figures but said last year that the event achieved record global sales.Adobe Digital Insights predicts that the sales event will drive $23.8 billion in overall online spending from July 8 to July 11, 28.4% more than the similar period last year. In 2024 and 2023, online sales increased 11% and 6.1% during the comparable four days of July.Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, noted that Amazon’s move to stretch the sales event to four days is a big opportunity to “really amplify and accelerate the spending velocity.”Caila Schwartz, director of consumer insights and strategy at software company Salesforce, noted that July sales in general have lost some momentum in recent years. Amazon is not a Salesforce customer, so the business software company is not privy to Prime Day figures.“What we saw last year was that (shoppers) bought and then they were done, ” Schwartz said. “We know that the consumer is still really cautious. So it’s likely we could see a similar pattern where they come out early, they’re ready to buy and then they take a step back.” Tariffs don’t seem to be impacting costs much (so far) Amazon executives reported in May that the company and many of its third-party sellers tried to beat big import tax bills by stocking up on foreign goods before President Donald Trump’s tariffs took effect. And because of that move, a fair number of third-party sellers hadn’t changed their pricing at that time, Amazon said.Adobe Digital Insights’ Pandya expects discounts to remain on par with last year and for other U.S. retail companies to mark 10% to 24% off the manufacturers’ suggested retail price between Tuesday and Friday.Salesforce’s Schwartz said she’s noticed retailers becoming more precise with their discounts, such as offering promotion codes that apply to selected products instead of their entire websites. Shoppers might focus on necessities Amazon Prime and other July sales have historically helped jump-start back-to-school spending and encouraged advance planners to buy other seasonal merchandise earlier. Analysts said they expected U.S. consumers to make purchases this week out of fear that tariffs will make items more expensive later.Brett Rose, CEO of United National Consumer Supplies, a wholesale distributor of overstocked goods like toys and beauty products, thinks shoppers will go for items like beauty essentials.“They’re going to buy more everyday items,” he said. A look at the discounts As in past years, Amazon offered early deals leading up to Prime Day. For the big event, Amazon said it would have special discounts on Alexa-enabled products like Echo, Fire TV, and Fire tablets.Walmart said its July sale would include a 32-inch Samsung smart monitor priced at $199 instead of $299.99; and $50 off a 50-Inch Vizio Smart TV with a standard retail price of $298.00. Target said it was maintaining its 2024 prices on key back-to-school items, including a $5 backpack and a selection of 20 school supplies totaling less than $20. Some third-party sellers will sit out Prime Day Independent businesses that sell goods through Amazon account for more than 60% of the company’s retail sales. Some third-party sellers are expected to sit out Prime Day and not offer discounts to preserve their profit margins during the ongoing tariff uncertainty, analysts said.Rose, of United National Consumer Supplies, said he spoke with third-party sellers who said they would rather take a sales hit this week than use up a lot of their pre-tariffs inventory now and risk seeing their profit margins suffer later.However, some independent businesses that market their products on Amazon are looking to Prime Day to make a dent in the inventory they built up earlier in the year to avoid tariffs.Home fragrance company Outdoor Fellow, which makes about 30% of its sales through Amazon’s marketplace, gets most of its candle lids, labels, jars, reed diffusers and other items from China, founder Patrick Jones said. Fearing high costs from tariffs, Jones stocked up at the beginning of the year, roughly doubling his inventory.For Prime Day, he plans to offer bigger discounts, such as 32% off the price of a candle normally priced at $34, Jones said.“All the product that we have on Amazon right now is still from the inventory that we got before the tariffs went into effect,” he said. “So we’re still able to offer the discount that we’re planning on doing.”Jones said he was waiting to find out if the order he placed in June will incur large customs duties when the goods arrive from China in a few weeks. AP Business Writer Mae Anderson contributed to this report. Anne D’Innocenzio, AP Retail Writer
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E-Commerce
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